The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is widely used for providing a reliable transmission service. A packet loss in a network cannot be avoided. In a conventional solution, a data packet that is acknowledged to be lost is resent using a timeout-based retransmission mechanism. For example, after a transmit end sends a data packet, if a corresponding acknowledgement (ACK) response sent by a receive end is not received within preset duration, it is considered that the sent data packet is lost, and the timeout-based retransmission mechanism is triggered to resend the data packet. However, the timeout-based retransmission mechanism is a retransmission mechanism with an exponentially increasing time interval. That is, a current retransmission time interval is greater than a former retransmission time interval, and the time interval increases exponentially. Therefore, the timeout-based retransmission mechanism cannot meet a requirement of a real-time service for TCP delay performance. How to improve the TCP delay performance is an important aspect for improving the TCP.
In other approaches, a Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology is used to resolve a problem of the TCP delay performance. In the FEC technology, a quantity of redundancy transmission times and a total time length of redundancy transmission are determined according to only network status information. This may reduce a timeout-based retransmission probability, but may cause unnecessary redundancy transmission, increasing unnecessary network overheads.